I know we write this type of post over and over again here, but I can’t stop myself…

I don’t want to make this another Firebaggers versus Obot post. I’m an Obot but I agree with some of the Firebagger criticism about Obama’s handling of the economy and mortgage issues.

I was at a party Friday night with a bunch of other liberal people. We talked about politics, and they all agreed everything was worse, all sad panda type stuff, no progress. I brought up ACA, which they kind of pooh-poohed, and I brought up that I didn’t think I’d see a black president in my lifetime, and now I have. They said he was bi-racial, so not such a big thing. I said you think that matters to the fringe, look at how they talk about him.

Then they got going on how awesome Clinton was relative to Obama. I countered that he didn’t pass anything as big as ACA. They couldn’t argue with that, but had some other stuff about how great the economy was and it was all his doing.

Why can’t Democrats just get behind Obama, admit ACA is a big win, admit Obama’s election was a big win? I’m a mopey, pessimistic, anxious, depressive person, but I still can’t understand it.

Look, we’re going to win in the end, make this country more inclusive, beat back the corporatocracy. It’s going to be a long hard slog, but we’re lucky to have some of the people we do on our side, including Obama.

https://www.balloon-juice.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/balloon_juice_header_logo_grey.jpg00Doug!https://www.balloon-juice.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/balloon_juice_header_logo_grey.jpgDoug!2012-07-02 20:48:572012-07-02 20:48:57If you love him, be proud of him

Good for you, Doug. I think people are coming around. They thought once Obama was elected, all he had to do was want it bad enough and good things would happen. Now, understand how much the headwinds are against change, and maybe they stop criticizing and start helping?

Once again, I will point out that much of Obama’s first term has been dedicated to fixing all the things Clinton fucked up. DADT, DOMA, ACA, not to mention the economy crashed because Clinton and Rubin went along with the Republicans and deregulated everything.

Gramm-Leach-Bliley which repealed certain provisions of Glass-Steagall, exposing American taxpayers to a pretty sizable chunk of bank liabilities.

(Sure, Gramm-Leach-Bliley pass the senate witha veto proof majority, but Clinton was actually a serious chearleader for the law.)

And

CFMA, the commodities Futures Modernization Act which created an International Commodities Exchange for derivatives trading and allowed all those Mortgage Backed Securities and Credit Default Obligations to be traded with absolutely no oversight.

BOTH laws played a very significant role in turning a bad mortgage bubble into an international catastrophe.

Clinton was kind of an asshole president, finance wise, if you ask me.

And it’s a dead-solid fact that if you’d checked on these party-goers while Clinton was in office, they’d be whining that he was so insufficient. If you checked on them in an alternate universe where Hillary had been elected president, they’d be whining that she was insufficient. If you checked on the ones from the alternate universes where John Edwards was elected, or Howard Dean, or Kucinich, or Mike Gravel, they’d all be sniffed at as insufficient and weak.

This November will be the eleventh presidential election in which I’ll be voting for the Democratic candidate. I’ve liked some better than others, but jeez, compared with any of the alternatives, I don’t see how any sentient being could do otherwise.

Clinton did some good things, but he also signed DADT, DOMA, and the legislation gutting Glass-Steagall. He also ignored repeated warnings about the ‘financial innovation’ that ultimately destroyed the economy.

I’ve got my issues with Obama, but he has accomplished far more in 3.5 years than Clinton did in 8.

It never ceases to amaze me that people really thought that a Black man in America even if he did make it to the highest office in the land would have a better chance than his white counterpart in getting shit done in the face of a group of people who not only dislike him and want to see him fail because he’s a Democrat, but who also through their deeds and policy consider his race to be subpar on certain levels.

The fact that Obama got done any of what he did and that not including the big two like ACA and OBL killing is still pretty damn awesome and should be celebrated.

I think Clinton-Obama comparisons are stupid, frankly, because the circumstances of the presidency were so different. Clinton had a bare majority in the Senate and was able to pass a good budget that helped the economy, but blew it on health care. Obama had a much bigger majority, and had many more successes, but he also inherited a much bigger mess.

Unfortunately, the one thing that they have in common is that we voters foisted a Republican House majority on them too quickly into their presidencies.

Did they forget the terrible laws that Clinton passed, such as: Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, expanding the number of offenses eligible for the death penalty and “three-strikes-and-you’re-out”?

Doug and I are in the same neck of the woods. “Liar” and “murderer” are the words used to describe Obama in the circle intersecting with my personal circle. And yet FDR is revered by the very same folk, despite my continued pointing out of horrible deals FDR made that–eventually, very eventually– yielded the very things that said folk now claim as sacred. I know: my point isn’t original. But I need to make it for my own sanity lest I burn up from within.

While I’m about it, though, it would be nice to have a Democratic President in the mold of Roosevelt or Johnson again. Clinton and Obama were far better than the alternatives, I’ll support and cheer for Obama this year as well, but face it—they would have been indistinguishable from liberal Republicans back when such animals existed.

@DougJ: then she is full of shit and I would love to know if she says that shit in front of a majority Black group. I’m gonna bet she wouldn’t.

ETA: Not to get into it here, but there is a long-standing conflict between African born African American and US born African American as a consequence of African diaspora. So someone of West Indian descend saying that really doesn’t surprise me.

And it’s a dead-solid fact that if you’d checked on these party-goers while Clinton was in office, they’d be whining that he was so insufficient.

+1 zillion. It doesn’t matter that your quarterback is a sure-fire Hall of Famer and your team is winning its division; you’re still going to be angry and frustrated after each loss, each interception, each bad pass. It’s only when the season’s over that you realize just how great the guy was.

@satanicpanic: I was saying something like this to my mom the other day. I have a few friends who’ve had their first kids in the past couple years, and I was thinking about when those kids are in high school and learning about this presidency (all EIGHT years of it :P) in history/government class…it’s going to be a phenomenal time period to study, partially because of the historic nature of Obama being elected by itself, but also all the really big things that have been done, despite the whiny Eeyores who think nothing has happened.

Haven’t read the thread yet but this is one of the things I totally hate about getting together with ‘liberals’ like they live in some fantasy land where the West Wing is the country we live in and Obama didn’t have to deal with nihilistic assholes and an almost-depression and yet had the most productive first 2 years for our side since the 60s.

I appreciate PPACA and I understand the how and why it happened like it did. But the reason it didn’t seem like a win was because it was the Democrats passing a Republican answer to a problem that Democrats have a far superior answer for (in the stupid hope of “bipartisanship”)…and then the way it was handled went a long way towards discrediting liberalism because now all that people know about “Obamacare” is that it forces them to buy private insurance (and even those who already have insurance are really, really pissed about that!)

And don’t expect people to figure out the good parts of Obamacare ever, either, the MSM’s not going to help.

Oh, and we now have an SC that is almost completely controlled by Fox News.

That’s why it’s a loss. The policy is better than before, but our institutions are now rubble and the public thinks, more than ever, that Democrats and Republicans are the same.

Look, we’re going to win in the end…, beat back the corporatocracy

I wouldn’t be so sure about that.

We’ll see what happens as demographics change, Hispanics take up a larger portion of the voting public, women abandon the R party, and the FNC audience dies off (average age viewer is something like 69(!) The median age viewer surely has to be something like 75.)

Once again, I will point out that much of Obama’s first term has been dedicated to fixing all the things Clinton fucked up. DADT, DOMA, ACA, not to mention the economy crashed because Clinton and Rubin went along with the Republicans and deregulated everything.

THIS
THIS
THIS
THIS

Barack Obama has spent most of his term cleaning up shyt that originated with Bill Clinton and gets NONE of the credit for it

Why can’t Democrats just get behind Obama, admit ACA is a big win, admit Obama’s election was a big win?

Because he promised a lot that he didn’t deliver on. Clinton’s big thing, at least for his second term, was balanced budget. He did it without gutting the government and the economy did very well. The success of the economy might not be anything related to Clinton or his policies but in peoples minds they are completely linked and he gets major credit for that. Clinton is the most effective President of my lifetime in terms of benefit to the American people.

The ACA is landmark legislation that hasn’t had a big impact on peoples lives yet. The fact that he’s the first Black President is historically important and it’s a wonderful thing to see in my lifetime but there is no substantive benefit. Maybe the man should get more credit for keeping our flailing economy afloat but people don’t want to just be afloat so he won’t.

The comeback to those Baggers is, if Clinton wasn’t so interested in THAT bush, we never end up with George W. Bush. Not to defend Ken Starr, but if you give your enemies dynamite, don’t be surprised if they, um, blow you up.

Really? Clinton helped bring about the mess we’re in, by going along with Republicans and signing the repeal of Glass-Steagall, and his “welfare reform” has left a lot of people with nothing because they’ve used up their lifetime welfare limit. True, he was a more skillful politician than Obama in some ways, but Obama’s main weakness on the economy has been that he’s hired too many of Clinton’s people. Both Obama and Clinton surrendered too often to Republican memes (era of big government is over, praise of Ronald Reagan, etc), and both relied on triangulation, which is a recipe for losing Congress to the other party (delegitimize your own people by presenting them as too left-wing and yourself as “just right”).

There is an election coming up, and we have the history and the choices we have, not the ones we would like to have in an ideal world.

So I do not see the point in arguing about how good or bad or whatever Obama is (or Clinton was). Obama is the candidate and Big Dawg can help get him elected. And the other side is far far worse.

Period. End of Story. Until after the election is over.

Edit: and yes I will forget and backslide and just will not be able to resist throwing in some rusty two cents from time to time when the kibbitzing posts come up. Remind me when I do that of what I just said. Thnx in advance.

My conversation with my adult son while on the phone with his S.O. OMG I just love the pres and would love to share the Lincoln bedroom with him..
S.O. What did your mom just say
Son. Health care is a good bill.

i don’t know that i would call myself an obot. i have strong misgivings over some policies. i also, from time to time, question his strategy. nonetheless (and i go back to truman), obama is unquestionably and by a significant margin the best president in my lifetime. crepehanging because (in the face of concerted opposition unseen since the civil war) he hasn’t accomplished everything we would want is just silly. far better to focus on the (underreported) things he has accomplished. given the opponents, anything less than all out effort to reelect him would be insane.

She’s a freakin’ idiot then. It sure AS HELL is a big thing. Both she and Obama are seen as nothing but blackly blackly black in major portions of this country, and will be for at least the next generation.

I fall on the side of “Because the kind of liberals you’re talking to only like Democratic presidents in hindsight”. Believe me — during the Clinton administration these folk or their equivalents whined incessantly about what a corporatist sellout Bill was.

The criticism of Obama is based mainly on the fact the economy is not booming. It’s way better than what he inherited, but (largely thanks to the Hoovers-in-statehouses cutting jobs) it’s not the “everything’s going smoothly” feel Clinton had (and alot of that was the dot.com boom, which turned out not to last).

I wish I could slap most of these Democrats upside the head. I’ve lived through five Democratic presidents, and Obama is second only to LBJ in effectiveness (and without LBJ’s glaring downside). As David Letterman put it: what more are we going to ask this guy to do for us? He averted a depression, saved the auto industry and decimated al Qaeda. If you can’t get enthusiastic about the guy who did that in under 3 years, you’re a moron clogging up the discussion.

Clinton did a great job of not being Ronald Reagan, when people in this country were utterly in love with Reagan. He figured out how to beat the GOP, and still carry the basic Democratic message. But LBJ he was not.

I think Gore would have been something of an LBJ, and I think Obama is earning that kind of “think big” attitude in government that will seems his reputation down in history.

All that said, none of these guys are the uber-liberal so many actual liberals want. We don’t want a moderate. A lot of us want some starry eyed Moonbat Kucinnich to UN-Bush the Overton Window.

Why can’t Democrats just get behind Obama, admit ACA is a big win, admit Obama’s election was a big win? I’m a mopey, pessimistic, anxious, depressive person, but I still can’t understand it.

The reason Democrats or the left generally doesn’t get behind him is the same reason that the Republicans and the right generally react so hysterically toward him. Racism. It’s just expressed a little differently on the left. This is the legacy of the old, “limousine liberal,” “I’m all for civil rights, but of course I wouldn’t want my daughter to marry one,” attitude. It’s “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” played out on the grandest stage of all

I’m not saying that any left-wing criticism of Obama is out of bounds. It obviously isn’t. But the tangible undercurrent of vitriol in the hyper-criticism from certain people is simply the result of the fact that there always have been many, many “liberals” who aren’t comfortable with black people — much less with an African American man in a position of authority.

We were on a cliff and did not fall over into a depression much worse than FDR’s. Although unemployment is high and we are just prodding along, it could be so much worse. Then the President passed protections for women, health care for all and with Miss Nancy laws that will affect us for decades. WTF is wrong with the American people. Even the Keystone pipeline was opposed in states where it could ruin the aquifer and the republican of Nebraska supports Romney who would have allowed that.. Give me a break. In my lifetime, there is no one like Obama and I’m glad we have him in office.

The only thing I disagree with John on is DADT. I think it was a necessary first step. Distasteful and immoral as it it was, it was less distasteful and immoral than what it replaced, and it made it socially and psychologically permissible to admit that there were homosexuals serving with honor in the ranks.

Having gotten that out of the way, I’ll say flat out that firebagger v. obot is more correctly understood as hillbot v. obot, with ALL that implies. All this anger of things that Obama has done or hasn’t done from the left always very conveniently overlooks the fact that there are no nationally electable Dems that would have been substantially different on many of those issues. Certainly not Hillary Clinton. Her whole campaign premise was the 3rd term of the Clinton administration. And while a lot of Edwards supporters found it easy to switch their loyalties to Clinton (who was married to the prototype for John Edwards after all,) very few were ever going to wholly support the black kid from Chicago.

And speaking of FDR, he could be criticized for being temporizing and timid in many ways. In the recent bio, I read he got nervous about supporting Social Security, thought it was going too far to fast for country to support.

FDR also had some bipartisan support for New Deal because a lot of Congressional Republicans were scared out of their minds that they would get dumped, and were facing fierce pressure from their constituents.

And the CW on bad economics beging the right economics was probably as entrenched in circles of power, expertise in 2009 as was when FDR came in, probably more so. The US and the Washington consensus model were not the ONLY game in town when FDR came in.

So, a lot of dismissive comparisons of Obama to past presidents miss the mark.

@Soonergrunt: Recently I said to someone that although I want the President to win reelection, I felt that he would go down in history as being one of the best ever. I disagree with you about DADT and Clinton. He was afraid to stand up for what was right. He was a good President but not a great one.

also, too was dadt harder to implement than the policy today.
it was a difficult policy to implement..

I wonder how all the innocent dead in Afghanistan feel about him? I’m a life long dem and will never vote for a republican for anything-ever. But stop asking me to just ignore the very bad things Obama’s done and just support him-blindly. Won’t do it.

And speaking of FDR, he could be criticized for being temporizing and timid in many ways. In the recent bio, I read he got nervous about supporting Social Security, thought it was going too far to fast for country to support

Good point. I think Michelle and Eleanor are the engines of progress, dragging the other half into the future.

True story: having drinks right before the 2010 midterm elections with a close friend who has voted dem for the past 15 years or so (late conversation but solid dem now). he tells me: but Obama is no Clinton. Why can’t he call the republicans on the phone more? hang out with them? if he did that things would be better! (me rolling my eyes and wanting to strangle him with that civility bipartisan bs)

Then he pipes in: what Obama needs to do to win in 2012 is to do a sister souljah to the center like Clinton did and do it by going against immigration because everyone hates illegals.

At this point I am gawking at him. Fast forward to now and see how wrong he was. But of course to people like him Obama has no talent as a politician and the only way he can win is by coddling the racists and throwing the latinos under the bus.

Granted, Obama disappoints us all on a daily basis, but anybody who wanks over the Bubba years either wasn’t paying attention back then or was too young to have a clue. Because even the most jaded firebagger could not possibly imagine Obama inflicting upon us such atrocities as triangulation, Mark Fucking Penn, or David Fucking Gergen.

I think there will be a lot more innocent dead lying around if Obama is not re elected. That is enough for me until after the election. Then start pushing for better foreign policy, and raise all the hell you want.

@BobbyK: Unfortunately, the afghan citizens have been dying for decades. I’m pretty old and can remember thirty years of conflict. I don’t know how the citizens feel about him and I certainly don’t know how they feel about Bush, Clinton, Bush, Reagan and so on.

Why can’t Democrats just get behind Obama, admit ACA is a big win, admit Obama’s election was a big win?

Because Obama’s election was a big win…for the 1%. Obama’s election was a big win for the nation security state jacakals like Dick Cheney. Obama’s election was a big win for the advocates of lawlessness, who assert in Richard Nixon’s words “If the president does it, that means it’s legal.”

Obama’s election was a big win for the drug warriors who love getting paid big bucks to slap handcuffs on dying terminally ill patients who use heroin because legal painkillers have been withheld from them. Obama’s election was a big win for the corrupt banks and crooked Wall Street thieves, not one of whom has been indicted and thrown in prison yet by Obama’s DOJ.

The entire tenor of your question is so bizarre and so hallucinogenically out of touch with reality, DougJ, that I can just picture you standing around in Stalinist Russia watching your friends and loved ones getting dragged away by the NKVD to gulags while military spending skyrockets and starves the domestic consumer economy into destruction, as you plaintively chirp, “Why can’t Russians just get behind Stalin, admit the Five Year Plan is a big win, admit Stalin’s election is a big win?”

Goddamit, get a fucking clue! The president of the United States has ramped up an already insane counterproductive self-destructive War on Drugs that’s wrecking this country. Everyone knows it’s insane, even the drug warriors themselves admit it’s doing the exact opposite of what the War on Drugs was intended to do…yet, like mad sleepwalkers, here America is, continuing with this insane self-destructive crazy policy even though we know it’s insane and self-destructive and crazy.

Barack Obama has signed off on an immense 8% increase in U.S. military spending in the midst of the most colossal economic downturn in 80 years, at the very moment when the spending for the rest of the government is frozen. Yet study after study proves that spending money on the military is the worst form of job creation, generating half as many jobs per dollar spent as other more productive forms of domestic spending, like education. Obama isn’t stupid. He knows this. Yet he continues with this crazy self-destructive policy. It’s insane, insane, insane, insane, insane. And yet he keeps on doing it.

Barack Obama has eagerly authorized his DOD to sell private police forces the military weapons like LRADS that blast peaceful protesters into deafness and nervous system collapse for daring to exercise their consitutional right to peaceably assemble and protest for a redress of grievances. Obama has delightedly given his imprimatur to an Orwellian network of universal surveillance so vast that deep in the Nevada desert, the NSA is breaking ground on the world’s largest data centers…all to store your email and mine, your phone calls and mine, all unconstitutional, all grossly illegal, and, as one former NSA official said you quit in disgust, “this close to a turnkey totalitarian state.”

Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.” It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy. (..)

When Barack Obama took office, [senior NSA crypto-mathematician William] Binney hoped the new administration might be open to reforming the program to address his constitutional concerns. He and another former senior NSA analyst, J. Kirk Wiebe, tried to bring the idea of an automated warrant-approval system to the attention of the Department of Justice’s inspector general. They were given the brush-off. “They said, oh, OK, we can’t comment,” Binney says.

Sitting in a restaurant not far from NSA headquarters, the place where he spent nearly 40 years of his life, Binney held his thumb and forefinger close together. “We are, like, that far from a turnkey totalitarian state,” he says.

Source: “The NSA is building the world’s largest spy center (Watch what you say),” Wired magazine, 15 March 2012.

Barack Obama has signed off on letting the financial crime lords who have destroyed America’s economy get away scot free. Economist after economist bemoans the fact that America hsa been captured by its financial parasites, and we’re not going to get a genuine lasting economic recovery until the stranglehold of these vampire squids is broken — and Obama knows this. Yet he keeps on doing the same insane self-destructive thing over and over again, giving these financial crime lords a free pass and a GET OUT OF JAIL FREE card over and over again (this latest time with Jamie Dimon’s screw-up at Goldman Sachs, yet another 9 billion dollar loss which will grow and grow and grow until eventually you and I, the taxpayers, will have to pay for it. Again.) See the article “The Quiet Coup,” The Atlantic magazine, 9 April 2009.

The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. If the IMF’s staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression, we’re running out of time.

Barack Obama sits around in the Oval Office picking which 17-year-old girl to murder that day with drone strikes from a stack of photos “that look like highschool yearbook photos” according to the New York Times article “Secret `Kill List’ Tests Obama’s Principles and Will,” 29 May 2012. Can it possibly not have occurred to you, DougJ, that when a guy sits around picking which young girl to murder that day from a stack of photos, we usually call that guy a serial killer and send the FBI after him? We don’t typically applaud someone like that and praise him and urge other people to re-elect him.

Obama’s ACA is a giant giveaway to the corrupt thieving U.S. medical-industrial complex and, like the Massachusetts health care plan on which it’s based, it’s a total failure because it contains no cost controls whatsoever. The 2011 report of the Massachussetts Attorney General is now in: their health care “reform” is no reform at all, because it hasn’t bent the cost of health care in that state by one jot, one tittle, or iota. Overall health costs in Massachusetts are up by 6% compared to nearby states, and there’s now a massive shortage of primary care physicians in that state. Massaschetts is in panic mode and they’re now talking about more radical solutions.

…[A]s was true for the OAG’s 2010 report on cost control, the 2011 report [by the office of the Massachusetts Attorney General on health care costs] was motivated by continued rapid growth in Massachusetts healthcare costs following the enactment of its healthcare reform law in 2006. That cost growth further highlights the “expand coverage now – deal with costs later” philosophy underlying the Massachusetts law and its nationwide descendant, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

Moreover, in those areas where health insurance premiums have dropped since the passage of the ACA, they’ve only done so because employers are now shifting the burden of paying for health insurance increasingly to workers, because health insurance premiums are rising so fast employers can’t afford to pay them. As the article “Mandatory Health Care a Bitter Pill for Massachusetts Low-Wage Workers” points out:

Take a look at the far right column on this chart and note the premium increase in 2010 when “adjusted for benefits.” If you put back all the costs that have shifted to members (higher co-pays, deductibles, co-insurance, etc.), premiums in 2010 would be rising at almost the same rate they have for the last decade or so. In healthcare-speak, this is called “benefit buydown.” The market is producing lower premiums, but it is because patients are paying more health care costs on their own.

ACA is a failed non-reform. It’s a giant scam. It contains no cost controls and forces average working stiffs to pay for-profit health insurance premiums guaranteed to rise in costs infinitely into the futrue. The ACA is a catastrophic trainwreck that hasn’t reduced costs and has sent the state of Massachusetts into panic mode with an ocean of red ink from continued ongoing health care cost increases. State after state is drowning in red ink as people who can’t afford to buy private insurance swamp their medicaid programs — state after state is frantically slashing its medicaid programs, which were supposed to take up the slack for the vast population of working poor who can’t afford to buy mandated insurance, but don’t have remotely enough money to care for the armies of chronically sick people who can’t afford the sky-high co-payments for their chronic illnesses. Obama knew this in 2008 when he ridiculed health insurance mandates:

“Let’s break down what [Hillary Clinton] really means by a mandate. What’s meant by a mandate is that the government is forcing people to buy health insurance… (..) Here’s the concern. If you haven’t made it affordable, how are you going to enforce a mandate? I mean, if the mandate was the solution, we can try that to solve homelessness by mandating everyone to buy a house.”

As Ezra Klein has pointed out in article after article, the problem is simple — the basic procedures in America cost insanely more than in other countries. Germany charges $280 for an MRI while America charges $1080. In Spain, people pay $30 for a routine doctor’s visit, while in America you’re forced to pay $190. Across the board, the underlying costs of American health care are sky-high and exploding through the stratosphere because in America, the only rule that governments health care providers is: “charge whatever you can get away with.” There are no cost controls. That’s the problem, and Obama’s bogus health care non-reform does nothing to correct that, absolutely nothing.

See Ezra Klein’s columns “High health care costs: it’s all in the pricing,” 2 March 2012, and “Why an MRI costs $1080 in America and $280 in France,” 3 March 2012.

“There is a simple reason health care in the United States costs more than it does anywhere else: The prices are higher.” — Ezra Klein, op. cit.

So why aren’t liberals cheering the ACA, DougJ? Why aren’t liberals getting behind him to work for his re-election?

Maybe because liberals don’t like the president of the united states ramming Bush policies like forced privatization and endless unwinnable foreign wars and infinite giveaways to financial crime lords who never get prosecuted down their throats. Maybe liberals don’t like a guy like Obama pissing in their mouths and then telling them it’s raining.

@gwangung: Folks in communities of color know when the hell being biracial matters and when it doesn’t.

THIS.

I admit I am both a white person and a human being who is completely baffled by this “oh, he could choose which race to identify with.”

It has to be an Alternate Universe where a person with any “ethnic” characteristics whosoever gets to pick and choose what racial strata they can roost upon. People who merely tan well can find themselves struggling in an environment where they are not known for several generations; to flippantly declare that a biracial person can “decide” to be white or black is a breathtakingly ignorant statement.

@JPL: I was serving at the time DADT was announced. I’m telling you, there wouldn’t have been a coup, but several Generals and Colonels would have to have been relieved, and you’d have ended up with a bunch of maimed or dead young men in barracks around the world. As it happened, a handful of senior officers were forced into retirement, and there were in fact, several assaults and at least one murder that I know of in the Army over the issue of homosexuality.
The American public was against allowing homosexuals to serve openly by something like 60 to 40, and that would have only gotten worse had it been done by fiat by a guy who, you may or may not remember, was routinely criticized as a draft-dodger during and after the election.
Just because something is right, doesn’t make it easy or smart. The big changes in this world happen in increments.

I had a depressing call with my sister. She’s a wealthy liberal, living in Northern Virginia. She, her husband, and their friends are going to vote for Obama but they aren’t enthusiastic about it and they aren’t giving him money. They don’t think going after their taxes alone will solve the budget problems, they don’t think he has taken on the problem of entitlements, and she feels that health care reform was done at the expense of the economy. She hates republicans, but doesn’t think Obama has been a strong leader. Words fail.

I loved Clinton when he was in office but I met him and had a ten minute conversation with him in 2004 right before the election, I came away thinking he did not want Kerry to win, all he was thinking was Hillary ’08…I did not like him after that. And, I don’t like him for what he did when he was in the office with Monica. Of course, I don’t care what he does in his private life, BUT he should have known better, IMHO!

not to mention the economy crashed because Clinton and Rubin went along with the Republicans and deregulated everything.

Your hypothesis doesn’t explain the fact that Clinton left a balanced budget behind when he left office. I also doesn’t explain that it was Bush, not Clinton, who cut taxes twice, fought two wars without figuring out how to pay for them, and insituted a frightfully expensive new entitlement program which was also not paid for.

All that said, none of these guys are the uber-liberal so many actual liberals want. We don’t want a moderate. A lot of us want some starry eyed Moonbat Kucinnich to UN-Bush the Overton Window.

They mostly want to have the kind of country where we can have a President like that. Let’s face it, the reason we don’t have a wacky moonbeam liberal as our President is because most Americans don’t want wacky moonbeam liberal policies. The minority who do support those policies seem to be happier blaming it on betrayal by their leaders than their own inability to convince the public to vote their way.

@Yutsano: Well, that stupid shit mclaren has arrived at #95 with what will be the first of I’m sure many long filibuster posts that both meander off-topic and contain multiple easily refutable factual innacuracies. So there’s that.

They mostly want to have the kind of country where we can have a President like that. Let’s face it, the reason we don’t have a wacky moonbeam liberal as our President is because most Americans don’t want wacky moonbeam liberal policies. The minority who do support those policies seem to be happier blaming it on betrayal by their leaders than their own inability to convince the public to vote their way.

Hell YEAH.

The blame is not solely on the leaders, but also on the people who elect such twits as leaders.

That can be changed, though. But that takes a hell of a lot of work. And it’s a word that begins with G and ends with -oots….

wtf are you and your friends whining about DougJ? Things are worse? Like the auto industry? Terrorists? Iraq?

Bin Laden is dead and GM is very much alive. The bailouts are all more or less paid back. Unemployment is down to about where it was when all this stared in 2008. Wtf are your friends whining about? I wish I was there. I would give them all a swift kick in their whiny asses!

I think you are just trying to get your gloom porn fix. You and Cole are just not happy unless you are sad.

Were these people of age during the 90s? I was, and I very clearly remember people going on and on and on about what a sell-out Clinton was. His first year or two were OK, though marred by DADT etc., but then the GOP won the House (is any of this sounding familiar?), he took up with Dick Morris, and the triangulation started. People on the left were VERY VERY MAD.

Not to mention the fact that I personally will never forgive Clinton for putting his entire presidency at risk for the dubious charms of Monica Lewinsky. Yes, the Republicans were unprincipled assholes. No, that does not make what Clinton did remotely OK. No, this is not because I’m anti-sex; I’m just in favor of having your priorities straight, and opposed to people who run for President and then set their priorities as follows: (1) Blow job from Monica Lewinsky; (2) The country.

It’s a mystery to me why someone would have those priorities, but hey: no accounting for tastes, etc. It’s all fine with me *as long as people who care more about blow jobs from Monica Lewinsky than about the country don’t run for President.*

I appreciate PPACA and I understand the how and why it happened like it did. But the reason it didn’t seem like a win was because it was the Democrats passing a Republican answer to a problem that Democrats have a far superior answer for

While this is true in the sense that the ACA is taking from Republican proposals to the problem, it side steps one very important point. At each an every turn, from Harry Truman, to Obama, as Health Care solutions and single payer was discussed these Republican “anwsers to the problem” came about. Yet, they never were serious proposals. It was just the rhetoric that the GOP offered so that they had some cover for their opposition. Now, that these proposals have been made law, they still oppose health care reforme. Vehemently. See Jean Schmidt video. Because the Republican answer to the health problem is actually, “fuck you, I got mine,” and not the proposals they made in ’72 and ’92 that ended up being law in the ACA. They never intended to make them law. When they controlled the Congress, why is it that they never tried to make those proposals law? Why did we only hear them in opposition to Democratic proposals? Because they weren’t genuine.

If Kennedy had agreed to work with Nixon, imagine where we would be now. Kennedy himself said that opposing Nixon’s proposal in ’72 was his worst political mistake of his career. Because he knew what 30 years of tweaking and addition would have yielded by the time we get to now and the ACA. The ACA is the starting point we would have had in 1972.

@JPL: I thought that Clinton should have fired Powell for insubordination, but he let Powell dictate the terms of the engagement. Powell was extremely popular in the ranks, on the hill, and in the public at large, and I don’t think that, even as it would’ve been both correct and within Clinton’s right as CinC, that it would have been remotely smart to do.

@Soonergrunt:
I’m not sure if she commented here or not; I read her at her own blog. She was a Clinton supporter who completely lost it when Obama won the nomination. Turned total Palin-PUMA and supported McClain because… feminism or something.

@mclaren: You do realize that most people who read blog comment threads aren’t going to read anything this long, right? It looks like a lot of blah, blah, blah to me. Too many beers, too little time. Rather watch the ballgame.

@Soonergrunt: MyDD, where the PUMAs went when they fled the meanies at GOS and worked themselves up into a lather for their great ‘blog strike’, I think they called it. All cheered on by an increasingly nutty Jerome Armstrong.

Then you’d damn well better get your ass in gear and work to get Obama re-elected, because if you don’t like the Supreme Court now, you’ll like it even less after Romney nominates Janice Rogers Brown and Randy Barnett to replace Breyer and Ginsburg.

@DougJ: there was a spate of Republicans crying crocodile tears a while back about how Obama was so hard to work with and they missed Bill Clinton. The official Dem talking point was “HAH! you impeached him, you hypocrites!” I think it should’ve been “You mean the guy who passed the tax increases you now call social ism?”

@Soonergrunt: Don’t forget “…and in the press”. It was universally held in the DC press corps that Colin Powell should have been president, and could have been at any moment had he wished to try. The chances of the press letting Clinton prevail in a disagreement with Saint Colin were nil.

@pkdz: I think we could copy this and put it in the lexicon under “Totebagger”. At least as I understand the term. I’ll bet your sis watches MTP every week and owns all of Friedman’s books.

ETA@Tom Q: As close as both elections were, I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that Powell’s support put Dumbya in office for eight years, and he didn’t quit to make room for Condi. He wanted to stay and he had outlived his usefulness. If you read profiles of him, you’d swear he resigned to protest the Iraq War

I’ve lived what seems a long time now. Other than LBJ, there has never been a better and more admirable president of my lifetime. And he doesn’t seem to be flawed, and fatally so, in the same ways as LBJ.

I have my disagreements with the man, but I’ll be proud and happy to vote for and work to elect the man again. For all his flaws, I don’t expect to see his equal in my lifetime.

Your hypothesis doesn’t explain the fact that Clinton left a balanced budget behind when he left office. I also doesn’t explain that it was Bush, not Clinton, who cut taxes twice, fought two wars without figuring out how to pay for them, and insituted a frightfully expensive new entitlement program which was also not paid for.

Which have fuck all to do with what crashed the economy. The economy crashed because we let the banks gamble like crazy even though we knew we’d have to step in and cover their losses when the dice turned against them. Deregulation let them do it, and it had Clinton’s fingerprints on it (though plenty of others’ as well).

@Tom Q: that is a good point that is worth remembering. Powell was anointed by the DC press corps as the first African American to be President after Desert Storm.
Which is to say after another General executed a war plan that was thirty years old, using state of the art equipment against an enemy two generations behind on the ground with numerical parity, air supremacy, and excess logistical power.

Others may have said this, but if someone brings up Clinton as being more liberal than Obama, ask them why Obama has had to repeal DADT, undo DOMA, handle the problems with cutting back on Medicarewelfare, and overcome a number of the “third way” problems that Clinton caused?

Clinton was not more liberal than Obama. He got a better economy and a less dangerous world than Obama started with. He was more conservative.

And I know that he tried to pass UHC, but his response to the defeat was to give more away. Even with one party deciding it would not help a black man govern, Obama has gotten a number of things accomplished.

And everything to do with why the policy response to the crash was so inadequate. The deficits that Bush ran up made it politically possible for the Republicans to argue that we couldn’t afford to do a big enough stimulus.

” ‘Clinton’s big thing, at least for his second term, was balanced budget. He did it without gutting the government and the economy did very well.’

I think you’ve got the causation going in the wrong direction. Clinton was the beneficiary of an economy that was going 2,000 mph. Not the converse ”

Wait up, wait, wait! The Clinton bashing has gone too far.

1993, real GDP growth was dropping. It took guts for Clinton to call for his tax hike. Then in 1995 when economic growth was dropping again and GOP screaming to repeal the tax hike, Clinton did not fold.

You can call the roller of big cigars, the corpuscular one, and get him to fess up to all sort of concupiscent neoliberal deviltry, but just as much as any recent presidents he made his good economic record.

We can now praise all good Democrats, until after the damn election, OK?

I am a hard-core liberal. I am no obot. I am disappointed by many policies his administration has put out and/or continued from Bush’s, especially disgusted by his secrecy, drone program, etc. But for those “liberals”, who are dissatisfied with Obama,to say how awesome Clinton was compared to Obama, that’s just really screwed up. their heads are totally buried in their holes. Do such “liberals”really exist?

@burnspbesq: Unfortunately, there are too many Democrats who are almost physically incapable of this. They’ll tell you they’re voting Obama, but not without a litany of how many regrets are attached. They did the same thing to Clinton in ’96. (I remember Ileana Douglas being on Bill Maher’s Show saying “I’m a Democrat and I’m ashamed of who I’m voting for”. Way pre-Lewinsky, of course)

Compare this to how Republicans convinced themselves Bush in ’04 was the greatest goddamn president this side of Ronald Reagan (“More and more, this presidency feels like a gift” — Peggy Noonan). Everybody says, oh, we don’t want to be slavish like the GOP. I say we could damn well use a little of their team loyalty. They went to the wall for a crappy president; our people are yawning over a damn good one.

@BGinCHI: “I had no idea women found men who could do maths in their head so sexy. It also seemed to rev their paddleboats that I could quote appropriate song titles for any charade based situation they could imagine.”

@Soonergrunt: Powell at the time was disappointing but has come around. Maybe it was his political leanings at the time. IMO, (Powell was a white house fellow and that could have shaped his political leanings.) I do think that DADT was a stepping stone but an unnecessary one. Soldiers aren’t suppose to lie.

1. The way things get done always matters more, in the end, than what gets done. The people who thought HRC was more qualified than Obama to take over as president are not uniformly idiots, racists, or bitter feminist hags. The determination of certain factions to paint them this way has not helped anyone — not the president, not HRC, not the public. A few loudmouthed idiots do not represent all HRC voters, but when the people who supported her get tagged as PUMAs and vilified, it doesn’t do anything good for our discourse.

2. Obama always was and still is a POLITICIAN, which is to say that he’s someone who has chosen to work within our system, including the filibuster, the senate rules, the formality of the diplomatic system, the possibility of drones as policy, and so on. He can’t be faulted for not overthrowing that system. He’s part of it, by his own choice and by our votes.

3. I think that Obama will be re-elected, but what I personally want to see is what he does when he’s out of office in 5 years — when there’s nobody to answer to and nothing left to negotiate. He really is going to be uniquely qualified to say and do things on a world stage that has not been seen before.

Personally, I hope when Powell passes from this world the beneficent FSM sees fit to dip his entire body in honey and then suspend him upside down by rope above a huge fire ant colony in the desert. Then each soldier who died in Iraq gets to take a whack at the rope while Powell spins there waiting.

@IamNoYoda: My sister was mad that they “threw Clinton under the bus” when they revoked DADT. I tried to explain that I got Clinton was trying to do something good but at some point values change; while it might have seemed like an improvement at the time, people realize now how awful his policy actually was. She was drunk so that didn’t go over so well.

And everything to do with why the policy response to the crash was so inadequate

Which is not what Cole was talking about. His point was that the 2008 crash was, at least in part Clinton’s fault because of his unfortunate willingness to eliminate the regulations that kept the banks from destroying our economy. Clinton’s role in setting up the crash ought to be on the mind of anyone who wants to hold him up as a liberal paragon in comparison to Obama; that’s what Cole was trying to say.

@Corner Stone: “I had only gone to the party to talk about literature or philosophy. Then the police came and I was whisked away by a tall policewoman in an unmarked car. I was all set to protest when I was overcome with Burkean Modesty.”

@burnspbesq: Yeah I mentioned that it was perception instead of an actual link at play, but the answer remains the same. That perception is part of why people love Bubba and feel disappointed with Obama.

Not many men who sit in the Oval Office have the opportunity to be remembered as great presidents. Clinton didn’t serve during a time of great crisis, therefore he didn’t get the opportunity that George W and Barack Obama have had. He also didn’t leave behind any lasting signature piece of legislation that had a real positive, permanent effect on the nation. That is also a product of the times as much as it is a reflection of Clinton’s success. I think he was a good president in a time when that was probably all that was possible. But I do agree with an earlier comment from Hilzoy. In essence, Clinton had no fucking discipline. Doesn’t anyone remember that mess of a transition he he presided over. I mean who waits until 2 days before the inauguration to name a chief of staff?

DougJ, let me be about the hundredth person in this thread to point out that your dinner party friends almost certainly hated Clinton when he was President. They’ll discover that they love Obama around the time the next Democratic prez takes office, and only then as a point of contrast to the suckitude of whoever that president is. Basically, they’re idiots with low self-awareness and crappy memories. Otherwise known as humans.

I have never, ever heard a black person (and most of my family is black and most of the people in my neighborhood are black for the record, so it’s not like I have to go very far to be privy to these conversations) look at this President and this First Family residing in the White House and say, “It’s no big deal because Obama’s mama was white!” Doesn’t mean it’s never happened, but that’s a totally white-not-so-liberal’s comment.

@joeytomato: I just love how you have such complete and utter lack of control of your behaviour that you return to a blog you’ve been banned from six times now just because you think it proves some sort of superiority. No one here takes you seriously. On anything. Now go back to licking Harper’s boots like a good little Con.

@TBogg: There definitely is that element in the party. I call them To Kill a Mockingbird liberals — their client Tom Robinson dies, and they lose the case, but as long as Atticus can hold himself up as more principled than anyone else in town, they feel validated.

@jaleh: I am loathe to agree with Bill Kristol about anything, and Bubba is a complicated and contradictory man, more so than other people, even more than other politicians, but there is very a much a part of Bill Clinton that really likes being TheOnlyDemocratElectedToaSecondTermSinceFDR. Just like in ’08 he was torn between Hillary getting the nomination he deserved, and enjoying begin the only CLinton who had the “Clinton Magic” (AKA: Ross Perot and a really weak opponent).

I think idiot racists are greatly outnumbered by the short-memoried and sentimental fantasists like Ed Rendell who buy into the “Clintons are warriors!” fantasy

And I think a lot of them are like deranged Red Sox fans endlessly reliving Game 6 of the 1986 Series. They were so close to getting what they wanted, only to be denied, and they can’t forgive or forget or stop talking about it.

@TBogg: *Progressives* maybe. Liberal Dems need to get a grip. Willard Rmoney Thurston III is the worst case scenario of an American president ever in our lifetimes. Beyond Nixon, beyond dubya. This guy will sell us out and “ha ha ha ha” while he does it. CAN WE ALL GET ALONG!!! We have a clear enemy and we need to fight him.

and I brought up that I didn’t think I’d see a black president in my lifetime, and now I have. They said he was bi-racial, so not such a big thing.

Nah, tell them liberal pussies that he’s black. In this country, one–ONE–drop of black blood has always made you black. Yeah, I’ve noticed a lot of white folks lauding our “first biracial President”–and technically, they’re right. He is biracial. But in America, biracial has always meant just a lighter shade of black. Ask all them biracial kids kept as slaves of their white slaveowning daddies back in the day.

And it IS a big thing, him being the first black President. Fuck them. Nothing is ever good enough for those assholes. They stay mad because PBO is outdoing their boy Bill easily. They deserve to live in a country run by the extreme right.

3. I think that Obama will be re-elected, but what I personally want to see is what he does then—when there’s nobody to answer to and nothing left to negotiate. He really is going to be uniquely qualified to say and do things on a world stage that has not been seen before.

…unless voters sandbag him with a Republican House and a Republican majority in the Senate.

I’m hoping for President Obama’s re-election, but I’d also like to see control of Congress returned to the Democrats.

Once again, I will point out that much of Obama’s first term has been dedicated to fixing all the things Clinton fucked up. DADT, DOMA, ACA, not to mention the economy crashed because Clinton and Rubin went along with the Republicans and deregulated everything.

In the 90’s John Cole hated Bill Clinton for being too liberal. Now he hates him for being too conservative.

I am starting to think @DougJ is trolling now. Love and proud are strong words for feelings towards a politician, even he is the president. love and proud of this country and its people for electing the first non-white president. But love and be proud of Obama, a politician by all definitions? I think not!

The biggest difference between Clinton and Obama is that Clinton had a divided government and Obama had solid majorities in both houses. Therefore, more Democratic legislation SHOULD be expected from Obama than Clinton.

@NobodySpecial: Actually, Clinton had House and Senate majorities for his first two years, and didn’t have the new 40>60 Senate math Obama did.

@JWL: Me, too, and I don’t hate the guy, and I actually hope to vote for Hillary in 2016, but how “impeached but not convicted!” and “sitting in my lap with my hands quietly folded and voting for the Iraq War so Vice Principal Broder will put a Gold Star in my permanent record” morphed into “The Clintons know how to fight Republicans and win!” is beyond me.

@Yutsano: I think she’s the front runner for the Dem nod in 16 if she wants it, and if Obama is re-elected and the economy gets stronger, I think she’s a better than even shot. Of course, this is all like speculating who will win the oscars that year.

@Jim, Foolish Literalist: She’ll be 69 years old then and more than likely a grandmother. If she stuck in a role in the administration I’d agree with you. But she’s stepping down as SoS if/when Obama gets elected. That sounds like someone decoupling from politics to me.

Besides, PUMAs exist for mockery and scorn. If she gets the nom in 2016 I’ll vote for her gladly.

@NobodySpecial: Except that a lot of the Democrats Obama had to work with are business-friendly, budget-balancing “moderates.” Expressly modeled on… Bill Clinton. Clinton didn’t have the aggravation of dealing with dozens of mini-Clintons.

He’s a confrontational bad boy who’s one of the boys. He’s the frat boy who acts charming but you know after you sleep with him, he’s never calling you again. He’s college. And he beat the GOP at their own game.

And he’s white. Did I mention that he’s white? Oh yes, apparently getting blow jobs from your intern matter less than if you’re black. And Jewish (Elliot Spitzer) and gay (McGreevy). But definitely black.

And I knew when Obama won that there would be a ton of expectations and he’d have to try a zillion times harder than any other President because he’s the guinea pig. I also knew that he’d face more hatred than any other President. If he made a second term, he’d have a target on his back..in every way.

Obama is the kind of man who wants to govern by consensus in a non-partisan way. He found out that the hatred and disrespect of the GOP had more to do with his race than his political party. His way is to do thing incrementally yet no one respects the way he quietly

He has done some things I don’t like but I don’t expect perfection. I’m pragmatic, I see him as a better choice than a tea party puppet.

But the truth is, I think the a lot of the Dems in Congress fucked him over as well. It’s like they HATE that Obama is the candidate because he’s the best choice. But Obama is the last kid being chosen for gym class in their eyes.

Not all Congressional Dems or Dem pundits of course. But a lot of them are just like DougJ’s friends who are pissed off Obama became President in the first place and resent that.

Pardon me while I go ask my peeps in West Oakland whether Obama’s being “biracial” means he isn’t black enough.

I’m assuming the party you were at was whiter than Buffalo in January?

Clinton didn’t do shit. He gutted financial regulation, kicked poor people off welfare and lost both Houses of Congress to Newt Gingrich. His only signature achievement – balancing the budget and creating the start of revenue surpluses to help shore up SS was completely undone a few years later. On top of that, his prick ensured that he had no coattails for Gore to ride on and we wound up with Captain Flightsuit.

Obama kept the U.S. economy from nose diving into a depression, completely saved the U.S. auto industry (and gave the UAW a bigger stake in the Big 3 than ever before), enacted the biggest reform (and expansion) of healthcare since Medicaid (while sneaking in the biggest reform of college student aid in a generation) AND put a bullet in Osama bin Laden’s head. I think he might have also ended the Iraq War.

If your friends think he’s been a loser on the economy, go ask them if they’d like to be looking for a job in Europe right now.

3. I think that Obama will be re-elected, but what I personally want to see is what he does when he’s out of office in 5 years—when there’s nobody to answer to and nothing left to negotiate. He really is going to be uniquely qualified to say and do things on a world stage that has not been seen before.

Internationally, he’s right now one of the most popular US presidents. Even I think I’m crazy, but someone once said dream big, so I’m just going to say it:

You don’t get to talk about your nameless white liberal friends who don’t consider the President black. We call bullshit on David Brooks when he pulls crap like this. Either name and shame these racist jerkoffs, or I’m going to assume they didn’t happen.

You don’t get to make up imaginary liberal friends who spout stupid shit that discredits all liberals. Who are these people? Why are you hanging out with them?

I’m sick to death of all the obviously false anecdotes that stick to liberals for generations. No one spit on returning Vietnam veterans. Civil Rights marchers did not defecate in the streets. Anecdotes about unnamed liberals spouting clearly racist bullshit doesn’t fly either.

Skipping all the comments to answer you directly, Doug (on the very, very slim chance you’ll read all the way down here to a non-regular commenter). A few thoughts: Clinton wasn’t liberal, so people saying they’re liberals looking back fondly at Clinton are not liberals, or are not using evidence and logic in their assessment of him. The banking deregulation that has been so toxic was passed on his watch, so…yeah. Obama’s mealy-mouthed centrism has made me, a person who despised Clinton, reappraise Clinton a bit in a slightly more positive direction. At least he was up front about his centrism and corruption. And he definitely understood that politics isn’t mediation. I appreciate that at this point.

I can’t speak to why “liberals” who remember Clinton fondly would be all that negative about Obama, who, after all, brought back a TON of Clinton operatives when he took power. Perhaps it’s the fact that he has governed further to the right than Clinton, or perhaps it’s the willingness to deal away Medicare and Social Security.

As someone who was pretty far left as a teen who has moved right over time into being a progressive, and who volunteered for and contributed to Obama in 08, I feel profoundly betrayed. I recognize at this point that I misunderstood who he was and what he was going to do, but I also think he was quite dishonest, as well. He wanted to be President, and he needed to knock off another centrist to get the nomination, so he ran left, made claims to being progressive, implied that all his small money donations made him less beholden to the monied elites, and got progressives to back him. I was desperate to avoid putting the now richer, even more corrupt Clintons back into power, and I gladly bought into his line. I was honestly stunned when Larry Summers, et al., were immediately brought back in.

I believe he was forced into doing some kind of health insurance reform, sold out all attempts at real health care reform immediately, in secret — directly in contradiction with one of his signature campaign promises — and tried to drop it again after Kennedy’s death. Pelosi forced him to go through with it. The Ledbetter Act was already queued up; he didn’t initiate it or champion it. What he DID try to do was his grand bargain, which in my opinion is a complete betrayal of democratic principles.

He’s a liberal Republican corporatist, except he’d never get elected as a Republican. So he’s a “Democrat” who doesn’t want to have anything to do with the Democratic Party. Admittedly, the Democratic Party is a bag of wet cats, but I prefer a tote bag full of wet cats to a Martha’s Vineyard vacation rental full of MoTUs plus one anxious guy trying to stay in their good graces, which is how he strikes me now. At least the cats are fighting for SOMETHING, even if they’re clawing each others eyes out. I do think that a lot of people understand that the country is in terrible trouble, and he doesn’t seem to have any desire to fight for them, so they’re depressed. It’s an emotive response that apparently I, a leftist, and your party friends, centrists, share. I recognize that the Obot argument is that he has tried his best with limited tools. I don’t think that’s true, but I’m not going to relitigate that here. What’s relevant, I suspect, is that people want leaders with fire in their bellies, especially in a crisis, and he just hasn’t governed that way.

I’m not trying to pick a fight. I have talked about my disappointment with Obama here before and when I’m not ignored, I get “Firebagger!” hurled at me. But I’m speaking up again because I am trying to find my way to vote for him again, or at least figure out some way to engage around progressive candidates down ticket. I don’t want to just throw up my hands. I realize that’s part of the Republican strategy and yes, I realize that Romney and the Republican Party is much, much worse. My fear if I vote for Obama is that he’ll dump Social Security and Medicare, that if Romney was in office, the Democrats would rally and block him, but Obama will be able to do it (and that possibly that was the plan all along in terms of the Wall Street money that initially backed him). So that’s where I sit. Vote for him and possibly destroy the linchpins of the New Deal. Sit on my hands and guarantee a whole lot of other crazy.

One thing I like about Balloon Juice is that it’s not doctrinaire. This seems like a good place for people who live in the reality-based community to talk about this stuff. Obama will need the votes of a whole lot of people who are disappointed in him. Shunning us or hurling epithets at us won’t fix that. I’m a big believer in talking things through. You asked a question, I took it at face value and shared, in the hope that somehow, it’s useful. I’m happy to be persuaded. I WANT to be persuaded. I recognize that ACA was a win, but what was actually passed is Obama in a nutshell — compromised, limited, overly complex, with good ideas, important experiments, and vital reforms swirled together with corporate giveaways, bad Republican derived policy and poisonous loopholes. People like me who can’t clap with glee over it have good cause, and telling us to just cheer because otherwise we’re assholes isn’t going to cut it. His 08 victory isn’t a big deal in retrospect because it seems clear, from my POV, that he has governed poorly, insulating himself too much, being too quick to rely on Wall Street connected “old hands” and too slow to adjust to the enhanced crazification of the Republicans. I gave up voting for a woman to vote for him. Now, frankly, I wish I hadn’t — not that I think she’d have done better, because I still think she hadn’t demonstrated any real reason to make her chief executive, and was a demonstrably poor manager. But if we’re going to say the symbolism is what counts, that symbol is just as important to me, and we chicks are half the country. So if I could take that do-over, I probably would.

Anyone who says that racism isn’t part of it…hmmmm…why don’t we just put Obama in Florida or any other state that has Stand Your Ground.

Just have him walking down the street…imagine if his security detail wasn’t there.

How much do you want to bet that Obama would be the next Treyvon Martin?

After all, it seems like the rule of law has been overturned because of the attitude that laws mean nothing. Respect means nothing. Threats against the President’s life by members of Congress and other members of the GOP is no longer treasonous.

Isn’t the fact that Obama became President threatening to them?

Do the math then tell me racism has nothing to do with the hatred of the President.

Because you see, Hilary would have done the same. She’s more of a hawk than Obama is.
There goes your first excuse PUMAs.

@Corner Stone: Enlighten me. Clinton had some holdovers from the glory days, ahem, of Southern Democrats — like Nunn and Shelby and Heflin and Hollings. But IMHO Clinton had a lot of old progressives still around, like Paul Simon and Howard Metzenbaum, and in Obama’s years the last of the old lions are dying off. Instead you get Evan Bayhs and Mark Warners, who made themselves in the image of Clinton.

@ReflectedSky: You seem to be bent on trying to scare yourself with bogeymen of your own creation. You believe Obama had this and that bad motive and may do this and that worse thing, which makes you feel frightened. Well, snap out of it. If he’s only a liberal Republican to you, well, the alternative is a conservative Republican, and that’s worse. The poles on the political compass shift over time. Want more liberal presidents, then make more liberal voters. Waiting for it to work the other way around is like the Highlanders longing for Bonnie Prince Charlie.

Perhaps it’s the fact that he has governed further to the right than Clinton, or perhaps it’s the willingness to deal away Medicare and Social Security.

In what ways has Obama governed further to the right than Clinton? Please be specific. It can’t be civil liberties, because Clinton pioneered Bush’s practice of extraordinary rendition of terrorist suspects. It can’t be gay rights, because Obama had to overturn Clinton’s DADT compromise so that gay people could serve openly in the military. It can’t be welfare, because Clinton oversaw the biggest gutting of welfare since the New Deal. It can’t be regulation of the financial markets, because Clinton is the one who championed and signed Gramm-Leach-Bliley, which crippled government oversight of financial markets.

So, keeping the facts in mind, please be specific: in which arenas has Obama governed to the right of Bill Clinton?

@myiq2xu: And in stumbles the friendless PUMA troll, tripping all over the favorable links to wingnut web sites and his sock puppets that are cluttering up his shitty little blog the Crawdad Hole. Oh joy. Next time you comment here can you hit the “LOUDER” button so we can hear your mewling better? It’s awful hard to hear with Jim Holt’s balls resting on your chin.

@David Koch: No shit. The notion of taking a universal corporate investment-rights / fuck you labor treaty drawn up by one of the most thieving, unelected shit leaders of Mexico, Carlos Salinas de Gortari and Bush Sr., and then representing it — NAFTA, I mean — as some sort of initiative to help US and Mexican workers in concert with the largest ever assemblage of corporate lobbying ever formed [USA*NAFTA], and then passing it with Republican majorities and a few conservative Democrats over and against a majority of Democrats in both House and Senate — this is liberal?

Any fucker who argues that Clinton was some kind of progressive hero rather than a rather disappointing centrist sell-out is either completely delusional or lying off their ass.

I think the main problem is that there is a meaningful amount of liberals who are disappointed in the overall center-right to hard right tack the political class tends to orbit around and the way supposed liberals continue to cede ground on it and honestly they have a good point on that.

But those aren’t the fuckers DougJ was talking to. Those fuckers are just old fashioned racists bitter that “their” centrist sell-out candidate was pre-empted by some upstart n-CLANG centrist sell-out and thus can’t ever do anything right.

And they put genuine progressives in a bind where they have difficulty being heard over the racist fuckers like that and the people defending against racist attacks to make arguments that go more like:

“Yes, the ACA was a great political victory for Democrats, though the ideas it contains are conservative at their core and have elements that are worrying from a long-term perspective of having a functional health-care system like a real first world nation. That said, conservatives be insane, yo, and this might be the best we can do now to help real people who need it, but it’d be nice if that didn’t erase the ability to point out the flaws so we can fix those later once we shoot all those lunatics into the sun.”

It’s also possible that more people than you might think simply don’t remember much of anything that characterized Bill Clinton’s political activities, and are just recalling what they’ve been told in retrospect, particularly from the Dark Ages when people had to be reminded that there was life before the Bush Jr. triumvirate.

For 8 years people had to be reminded that whatever was claimed as reality and as unavoidable under the horrors of Bush Jr., it was different under Bill Clinton, because under Bill Clinton, etc. I.e., under Bill Clinton, FEMA wasn’t a fucking joke that represented something Bush Jr. would eventually be reminded about while New Orleans became a submarine wonderland.

From there it’s easy to remember the tonal quality of those various melodies, and assume that because they heard that Bill Clinton was so much more awesome than George W. Bush, he must be more awesomer than Obama.

Embarrassing. “If you love him be proud of him?” Is Obama our elected representative that we hold accountable for stuff he does or doesn’t do, or an idol that we all have fanboy/girl crushes over? Obama has done some useful things that you can argue justify his re-election, but losing perspective and asking all of us to clap louder just seems desperate and sad.

I’m a mopey, pessimistic, anxious, depressive person, but I still can’t understand it.

me, too and i’m relatively happy! i’m very happy about the the Supreme Court decision for more than one reason.

in their relentless hubris, republicans obviously never expected this ruling and they are completely unprepared, stuttering, fumbling and mumbling about a “Patient Centered” approach, per Luntz. but they got nuthin. maybe it’s just me, but i think the Chris Wallace interview question to McConnell was most significant (“what is your plan to replace universal health care”) on Fox?? Really? the debate is turning.

i’m not saying Fox won’t, for the most part, go on with their standard talking points, but the SCOTUS decision has initiated, finally, an examination of exactly what’s in ACA.

Well, I’m not so sure that the ACA is a big win. It looks like implementation is going to vary state-to-state, and the inequities may last for years. If the ACA had failed, either in Congress or the courts, it would have been a big loss.

And deportations, assassinations, and drone strikes–we corvids are so with the program.

i have tried, but not really been able to stop loathing Clinton. guy had a once in a lifetime chance to change direction and threw it away, and in doing so gave us GW Bush. so you see not everyone who doesn’t like Obama is a PUMA.

@ReflectedSky: yes, but you see here no one has any actual counterargument, just ad hominems.

@mclaren: actually it seems that many people do like being told untruths. not sure why that is, except that attachment to political figures is often irrational. either that, or cognitive dissonance is the force at work here.

@Mnemosyne: though i personally think such distinctions are kinda meaningless, in that it is more important to evaluate a policy/leader on her or his own than to engage in oft-useless comparisons, here are some “more rightist than Clinton” policies:

continuing the Bush tax cuts
ramping up whistleblower prosecutions
“race to the top” education “reforms”
increases in military spending
continued erosion of civil liberties including national coordination of OWS suppression.

i can probably come up with a few more if need be. that said, i don’t think Obama is that much more to the right of either Clinton.

@ReflectedSky: You are being too reasonable. In the USA, at least, the largest plurality of voters vote on group affiliation or dislikes, and that what is reflected here. For people who vote on loyalty, changing allegiance is like leaving a family, or at least a tribe.

Part of what this implies is that, if this largest group of voters is to be reached, they must be presented with a credible and attractive alternative. This, in turn, implies opening a space for a new party. Which may come to pass: the Republicans seem to be self-destructing. But it also means significant media and electoral reforms and these, I think, will be part of any successful progressive program.

For myself, I live in a safe blue state. If it still is that when the election comes around, I plan a protest vote. I simply have no heart to vote for the man who has participated in deportations, assassinations, and drone strikes, who has been one of the banksters bulwarks against prosecution and regulation, and who has let the economy go down the toilet. I might vote for Obama if it looks like Romney has a chance of winning in my state. Or I might not.

@kay: i agree about NAFTA, but perhaps welfare “reform” is second, because it put a stake through the idea of assistance without the workhouse/workfare element. henceforth, only the deserving poor should receive assistance.

For myself, I live in a safe blue state. If it still is that when the election comes around, I plan a protest vote. I simply have no heart to vote for the man who has participated in deportations, assassinations, and drone strikes, who has been one of the banksters bulwarks against prosecution and regulation, and who has let the economy go down the toilet. I might vote for Obama if it looks like Romney has a chance of winning in my state. Or I might not.

You’re free to throw away your vote if you wish.

As a cancer survivor whose future hinges on the survival and implementation of the ACA, though, don’t expect any high-fives from me.

I do remember being angry and afraid back then for the future, correctly so, that Clinton’s economic policies were substituting credit card wealth and real estate booms for actual middle-class wealth and that it would cause problems down the road His popularity would have been much less had the Republicans not over-played their hand.

As “The So Much The Most Liberal Person In My Office, Because I Even Voted For Jesse Jackson For President” award winner (self selected) there is much that don’t agree with President Obama in his selection of policies and tactics, yet we are moving forward as much as can be expected. The corporate and ideological enemies of a republic democracy are behaving very aggressive right now and I don’t see how we can do much better than we are right now.

“Why can’t Democrats just get behind Obama, admit ACA is a big win, admit Obama’s election was a big win?”

Two reasons:
– Democrats are kind of comfortable being the sullen underdogs. “Someone else” is always supposed to be doing the fighting, and those bastards always let us down. Winning is just a clever scheme to get us to get our hopes up, and we’re too smart to fall for that.

This is the phenomenon that I call “hand-wringing”, and I really hate it. When I canvassed for Obama in 2008, I soon learned to take the more conservative areas that nobody else wanted. The alternative was encounter after encounter with voters who ‘wanted’ to vote for Obama, but “just didn’t think that he could win”. I explained again and again the electoral college leads, the demographic shifts, the ground game, the 50-State strategy, etc.

My reasoning was always dismissed as ‘true’, but “the other side really thinks that they’ll win”, so it doesn’t matter.

It was a lot easier on my sanity to get doors slammed in face, or get expletives hurled at me, than it was to see so many feeble-minded Democrats who won’t vote because the Republicans are confident in the face of imminent defeat.

The other immense aggravation were the “gimme” Democrats. They have ‘big problems’, and they want to know what Obama is gonna do about their clogged gutters, noisy neighbours, or urgently-needed car repairs.

The passage of the ACA, and the Supreme Court decision in its favor are a victory in a battle, not a victory in the war.

The Democratic authors of the ACA knew some states would encounter political or logistical impediments to setting up exchanges on their own, and thus empowered the Department of Health and Human Services to enter states and set up so-called federally facilitated exchanges, even over the objections of state officials. […] So why isn’t Jindal reluctantly complying rather than hand a small measure of sovereignty over to the federal government? Because as the result of a drafting oversight, Congress neglected to include automatic appropriations for federally facilitated exchanges (FFEs). That means there’s money on hand to help states that want to set up the exchanges themselves, but the government’s options vis-a-vis states that can’t or won’t act on their own are more limited. –http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/07/affordable-care-act-insurance-exchanges-obamacare.php

Well-said. I agree with you whole-heartedly. In fact, I would like to see all Dems stop criticizing him from now on and till after the election. Remember, the second term he may be able to do more because he won’t have to think about running again.

The only way anything ever changes is if people don’t vote for the incumbents.

Right, but that’s best done in primary elections, not the general elections. Joe Lieberman lost his Democratic seat to Ned Lamont in a primary election, for example.

I appreciate your sympathies for my preexisting condition, but I would appreciate your vote for the ACA even more. The more Republicans you allow to take power in office, the less hope I have for my future as a formerly sick person in this country.

I can’t speak for anyone else, liberal or not. But the ACA is a pile of crap. In my opinion, it’s worse than nothing. It further entrenches the idea that for-profit makes sense in the medical field.
If you wish to turn this into some you’re-for-us-or-against-us, so be it. But guys like Obama will only respond to the left if we push.

You mean your anonymous, completely meaningless anecdotal bullshit (which has people on Twitter referencing this post as proof as why you should hate The Left) confirms your pre-existing, redbaiting, cull-organizing, New Republic bullshit worldview?